What then, comes the anxious question, comes next?
I wrote that question to close my last entry. Now, two weeks later, the Monkey's Paw has obliged and it seems quite a bit more ominous. The last few mornings, I've woken up, swiped through my phone for a minute or so, and been relieved that nothing cataclysmic has happened. Doomscrolling, as it's called, is a process that we've slowly become used to in the course of the last few months. We spare a few minutes to find out what next bad thing has happened; murder hornets and pool parties and tear gas at our fingertips. I now know, for instance, that the CDC releases national and state-by-state all cause mortality data on Fridays at about 11:00 Eastern. We adjust ourselves to these strange patterns and daily and weekly liturgies.
Everything is seeming to coalesce into what Adam Elkus calls the omni-crisis. If you are conspiratorially oriented, you imagine this as the machinations of some cabal of organizations working about to bring the world under its control. Maybe you are listening intently on the scanners or looking for the drops, eager to find what's coming next. (Maybe you should make sure your tin foil hat isn't too tight and maybe you should turn off InfoWars.) Maybe it's just an outworking of myriad factors in an unstable situation. If we remove enough bricks from the Jenga tower, things go from fine to wobbly to unpredictable in a hurry. I'm not sure how far back we look to determine the first brick removed, but it seems like we've been playing the game to get it over with in the last few years.
A key theme of Elkus' essay is that an effect of the omni-crisis is to make even our near-term expectations of the future incomprehensible—"The simplest way to understand the omni-crisis is as the sustained breaking of expectations and disruption of the ability to simulate the future forward using assumed constraints." As the crisis lingers, the previously unthinkable becomes the half-rational—"prolonged disruptions tend to alter the calculations of those still capable of calculating at all during stressful times. Once-sure bets are cast aside, forcing hedging behaviors and consideration of previously taboo actions and operations."
We've seen this sort of disruption on a personal level, first with the advent of Coronatide and then the Lockdowns. As the situation on the ground changed, we started referring to it as "the new normal." Several took exception to that labelling, insisting that it was "anything but normal." Still though, I can't think of anyone who has suggested that, when this is all over—for some incredibly hazy value of "over"—that everything would be the way it was. There was briefly the opportunity for some hope that this could turn out a change for the better, but that hope is fading, if it is still burning at all.
As the protests and riots increased in intensity, and the President did his level Presidential best, I started to think about an essay by Ezekiel Kweku, written shortly after his inauguration. This was published two months into his administration, before even the turmoil of Charlottesville's Unite the Right rally (such simpler times). I don't believe there was a precipitating event for the essay, at least in the way of a hashtag-protest, but it was rather a commentary on the President's campaign and first address to Congress. Kweku considers the man a product of his times, having seen crime rise every decade of his life in New York City and then soar in the 1980's.
Calling this a “wave” or even a “spike” is accurate in retrospect, but it doesn't capture the climate for those who lived through it. We call a pattern a wave because we know it will eventually crest and collapse. It is the return to normalcy that gives a trend the shape of a spike. But for people who were living through this time, there was no reason to believe that they would see the other side of the wave. If, like Donald Trump, you were 44 in 1990, crime had risen in every decade of your life. High crime would have felt like the new normal.
The idea here is that the President's worldview was built around that trend continuing. Despite the fact that it didn't happen, that was the normal that formed him, and from which he made his projections about the future. We are, now, presumably living through another sort of wave. The pandemic itself is spoken of in such terms, with the fears of a second wave and its associated morbidities. The current protests make the water choppier still, and we struggle to stay on the top, to stay afloat, and to see calmer waters ahead. We do not know when they will come, nor to what seas the current will carry us. What projections forward do we now make, mired as we are in our present circumstances? Elkus, again (though I have inserted the link annotation at the end):
The omni-crisis drags on because there is little desire or ability on the part of authorities to resolve the confusion prolonged disruption generates. Their actions are often at negligent or irresponsible at best. At worst, they are deliberately malicious and hateful. ... [The] omni-crisis has significantly enlarged the space of possible outcomes beyond that normally considered day-to-day by most Americans. And it is not clear how many people in positions of influence and authority recognize this at all. They cheer on their favored factions and issue inflammatory declarations and demands. Do they know there are dragons where we are going? And, more disturbingly, do they even care?
Every night I put my daughter to bed, telling her a "Princess Abby" story and then reading one of the chapters from the Jesus Storybook Bible. Last night we read "The Captain of the Storm" - the story in Mark 4:35-41 where he calms the storm on the lake. I'll leave this is as the final note, because it's the perfect counterpoint to everything I've thought about here—our inability to map out what the future might look like, where the present crisis will leave us, and whether or not those in authority even care.
“HELP!” they screamed. “Wake up! Quick, Jesus!”
Jesus opened his eyes.
“Rescue us! Save us!” they shrieked. “Don’t you care?”
(Of course Jesus cared, and this was the very reason he had come–to rescue them and to save them.)